E.M. Forster: Quotes about life

E.M. Forster was English novelist. Explore interesting quotes on life.

E.M. Forster: 400 quotes40 likes

“I grudged her nothing except my company. But it has gone further, like the degradation of rural England: this afternoon (Sunday in April) all the young men had women with them in far-flung cameradeie. If women ever wanted to be by themselves all would be well. But I don't believe they ever want to be, except for reasons of advertisement, and their instinct is never to let men be by themselves. This, I begin to see, is sex-war, and D. H. L. has seen it, in spite of a durable marriage, and is far more on the facts than Bernard Shaw and his Life Force.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 59

““There are moments when I feel Howards End peculiarly our own." "All the same, London's creeping." She pointed over the meadow--over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust. "You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now," she continued. "I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world." Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly. Howards End, Oniton, the Purbeck Downs, the Oderberge, were all survivals, and the melting-pot was being prepared for them. Logically, they had no right to be alive. One's hope was in the weakness of logic. Were they possibly the earth beating time?”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 44

“Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.”

E.M. Forster

"Tolerance"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“A wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and — by some sad, strange irony — it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.”

E.M. Forster book Where Angels Fear to Tread

Source: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), Ch. 7

“Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Ch. 19 http://books.google.com/books?id=G7xfuc7lWvMC&q=%22Personal+relations+are+the+important+thing+for+ever+and+ever+and+not+this+outer+life+of+telegrams+and+anger%22&pg=PA199#v=onepage <br class="br">Howards End (1910)

“Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 216, to Florence Barger, 11 February 1922
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 251, to Florence Barger, 23 December 1924
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink; the nations of today behave to each other worse than they ever did in the past, they cheat, rob, bully and bluff, make war without notice, and kill as many women and children as possible; whereas primitive tribes were at all events restrained by taboos.”

E.M. Forster

What I Believe (1938)

“In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect — connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 33

“Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and am as fond as you. It confirms my beliefe that life is notall nonsense and cruelty—the inversion of Victorian complacency—but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 330, to Christopher Isherwood, 28 August 1938
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“Pain is good, I'd say, when it's incidental to Love. In 'I give up my life for my friend' it is my friend, not my death, that matters. And sometimes I needn't give up my life for him, I can live for him, and with him, and the power of the spirit is then equally manifested, I should think.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 285, to George Thomson, 1 August 1931
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 22